Design Showcase: Puo Educational Products
We recently created the web design for Puo. This dynamic company offers educational products – ie. puzzles, flash cards, games and books – for children in major African languages. Their mission is to promote African languages – and African culture – in a contemporary context.
The brief was to create a design that would appeal to both parents and children, and blend with their existing set of characters:
Since we mostly create photography-based websites this was a bit of a stretch! However, we embraced the challenge and hit the net for some preliminary research.
1. Research
If you have a look at children's websites, you'll notice that many developers subscribe to a “more is more” philosophy when targeting young audiences. We were surprised to find pages and pages of rainbow coloured menus, flashing elements, dancing mascots, blinking fonts – in short, it was more disorientating than an 80s psychedelic disco!
Web Research
We immediately set to developing a specific brand palette that would inform the design choices. Beige-orange would be used as the dominant colour to emphasize the 'Puo orange', while blue would act as the counterpoint hue. Colours were chosen according to their 'calming' properties:
2. Design
After fiddling with quite a few design ideas we opted for a mix and match header placing Puo characters in the foreground. The idea was to use a setting that was inviting, playful and imaginative as opposed to strictly school-related:
A few tweaks and revisions later and the following design emerged:
3. Programming
The website is currently in the programming phase. Special features will include multi-lingual support (English, Sesotho, Tswana, Zulu and Xhosa) and an interactive discussion forum – watch this space!
Edit: The website is now available here.
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